Caging Whitebark Pine Cones to Save Seeds in Yosemite and Sequoia and Kings Canyon

The project

The National Park Service used $193,750 of Burned Area Rehabilitation funds from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to cage and collect whitebark pine cones in Yosemite and Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks. Caging immature cones protects them from Clark's nutcrackers, which would otherwise take the seeds, until the cones can be collected ripe.

A backpacking job

In May and July 2024, a five-person crew from the Northern Rockies Conservation Cooperative, a subcontractor to American Forests, built 600 cages and donated 350 more. They fitted them over cones at branch tips on 110 trees in Yosemite and 80 in Sequoia and Kings Canyon — all in remote, high-elevation wilderness.

• In three weeks, the crew carried 420 pounds of cages on their backs, hiked 520 miles and climbed 150,000 vertical feet.
• They caged about 4,700 cones — 20–30 per tree.
• An eight-person crew planned to return in early October 2024 to collect the ripe cones and remove the cages.

What happens to the seeds

The cones go to the U.S. Forest Service nursery in Dorena, Oregon, where seeds are extracted.

• Some go into long-term storage — a seed bank — for possible use after wildfire.
• The rest are screened for resistance to white pine blister rust and watched for five years for infection and death, to learn what share of the population is naturally resistant. If resistance is high, the population may recover on its own; if it's low, the parks may return to the resistant trees to collect seed for restoration.

More funding: $300,000 in infrastructure-law funds pays the Dorena nursery to extract and store seed, run inoculation trials for rust resistance, and develop genetic markers from needles. Another $51,350, from Burned Area Rehabilitation and Inflation Reduction Act funds, hired an American Forests whitebark pine ecologist to coordinate the work and write a Southern Sierra whitebark pine conservation strategy.

Next

The next phase aims to collect cones from at least 600 trees across the parks, helped by an Indigenous youth crew, the Yosemite Ancestral Stewards. A further $255,100 in infrastructure-law funds has been requested to finish the collection and fund the ecologist for three years.

Sources

Based on "National Park Service takes steps to protect whitebark pine seeds for the future," National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain.